Tube City Almanac

September 01, 2004

Upon Further Reflection

Category: default || By jt3y

Was I a little bit testy yesterday? Eh. Maybe I'm due for my distemper shots. Maybe, as Dick Skrinjar of PennDOT once told O'Brien & Garry, I need more fiber in my diet.

It could also be that I have a bad taste in my mouth from reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. In the book, which made The New York Times' best-seller list, the author takes low-paying jobs as a hotel maid, a waitress and a Wal-Mart clerk to see if she can survive on minimum wage.

Surprise! She really can't pay for rent, food and utilities on $5.15 per hour for 40 hours per week. This should come as no shock to anyone except the large corporations (I'm looking at you, Wal-Mart and McDonald's) who have successfully lobbied to keep the minimum wage low.

The book is ostensibly sympathetic to people who work in minimum wage jobs, and I'm sure Ehrenreich is; unfortunately, what really came through was that she holds manual labor jobs in contempt. The underlying theme of the book seems to be: "I'm too good to be cleaning toilets" or making beds or stacking things for sale. By extension, in my opinion, then she holds the people who do those jobs in contempt --- after all, they should be smart enough to know that their jobs suck, and should get better jobs, right?

I find that attitude insulting and unrealistic. In fact, it's not very different than the conservative philosophy that people who work in minimum-wage jobs deserve their lot in life --- that if only they had a little ambition, they could pull themselves out of the lower-income bracket and out of their minimum wage jobs. (But, you know, don't give them any help in the form of grants for college, and don't help them with their health care. The private sector and charities will take care of that.)

It never seems to dawn on Ehrenreich that someone needs to clean the world's toilets and empty the world's garbage cans, and that they deserve a little respect and dignity --- just as it never seems to dawn on conservatives that some people are born without the natural abilities to go to college or start a business. Does that mean they have no worth? Should they be condemned to live miserable lives?

Either way, it's economic elitism, and I say to hell with it, whether it's on the left or the right.

So, maybe that's why I'm aggravated by the attitude that Pittsburgh could amount to something if only it could get some mythical steel monkey off of its back. By extension, it's another kind of elitism: If only it wasn't for all these damned old, poor people, Pittsburgh wouldn't be half-bad. Never mind the fact that it's those damned old and poor people who built Pittsburgh in the first place, let's marginalize them --- and one way to do that is to tell them that steel doesn't matter, and in fact, it never did.

Well, maybe if we all wish hard enough, we can turn Pittsburgh into Berkeley, or at least Madison, Wisconsin! C'mon, Tinkerbell, you can do it! And we can all sit around drinking white wine, voting for the Green Party, and discussing Marxist philosophy and modern art!


Please. Pittsburgh is what it is. Take that, and build on it. Yes, we need to move forward, and we need to get over our historic suspicion of outsiders.

But enough with the historical revisionism; without its history, Pittsburgh is just a tired old midwestern town without any of the "character" that people supposedly find so "charming" in places like Bloomfield or Lawrenceville.

...

Speaking of living in the past, work on the Diplomat continues to lurch forward, and I do mean "lurch." I don't give my cars cutesy names, but if I did, the Diplomat would be "Puddles," because that's what it's leaving all over my garage floor. I recently stopped a really bad leak in the transmission by replacing the pan gasket, only to find that there's a separate transmission fluid leak at the speedometer cable.

The valve cover gaskets are also leaking, or at least I hope they are; if they're not, then the rear main seal is going bad. For those of you who know something about cars, the rear main seal is the gasket that keeps oil around the crankshaft, and it is installed between the engine and the transmission. For those of you who don't know anything about cars, just envision dollar bills with wings, flying away from your wallet; that's what happens when the rear main seal goes bad.

With help from a friend, I've installed a new electronic ignition and distributor on the Diplomat which (hopefully) will fix its uneven idle. Before I did that, I had to make sure I wasn't doing anything that would make the car unable to pass state emissions inspection. Luckily, I wasn't, because the thought of trying to repair the vintage-1984 Chrysler "computer" that was (badly) controlling the ignition system filled me with dread.

If you have questions about what the state emissions program tests ... and what it doesn't test ... visit the state Department of Environmental Protection's Drive Clean PA Web site. I found it useful. It even includes a history of emissions testing in Pennsylvania, and links to the stations offering the lowest prices on tests!

I wanted to get the Dippy street-legal by this fall, but the driver's side window still isn't working properly --- the gears are stripped --- and on a little late-night "shakedown" cruise to see if the new carb and power brakes were working properly, the gas gauge decided to stop working. Groan. I don't see any legal requirement that the fuel gauge gauge work, but it seems logical to me that it would be consider "necessary" equipment.

After all of this work, I expect that the Diplomat will be a valuable collector car someday. By then, of course, the water engine and perpetual motion machines will have been perfected, which will make the Dippy seem positively quaint, don't you think?

...

Rick Moranis, in an interview with a trade magazine called Sound and Vision, talks about being a radio DJ in Toronto:

Back in 1976, I had a conversation with a listener that taught me more about listeners and listening habits than anything else I came across in radio. The most requested song was "Stairway to Heaven." And every time I answered the request line, it seemed, the request would always be "Stairway to Heaven." ...


One day, I was actually playing it on the radio, and I picked up the request line and said, "CHUM-FM." And the guy on the line said, "Yeah, can you play ‘Stairway to Heaven'?"


I said, "I'm playing it."


And he said, "I know. Can you play it again?"


I said, "Let me ask you a question. You love ‘Stairway to Heaven,' right?"


"Yeah, it's my favorite song."


"And I bet you own a copy of it, don'tcha?"


And he said, "Of course I own a copy."


So I said, "Well, why don't you just put it on and listen to it?"


And he said, "Because I want to hear it on the radio."


As someone who has occasionally answered radio station request lines, I can sympathize. In fact, I think I talked to the same guy a few weeks ago. If we didn't have "Stairway," he said, "Freebird" was acceptable.

Another of my favorite listener questions is: "Can I make a request? What kind of music are you playing right now?" Well, duh, since you're obviously not listening to our station, sure I'll play your request, dipwad.

A personal highlight was the lady who called and asked, "Do you know the request line number for (our competition)?" Yes, and I'm sure Sears will gladly give you the phone number for your nearest Target store.

Here are some more stupid listener questions, courtesy of KRUD.com.

...

Tomorrow: Reader mail, including a request for information about the old White Elephant nightclub out in White Oak.






Your Comments are Welcome!

Hey, hey! Watch what you say about the good people of Bloomfield and Lawrenceville.
Prof. Quackenbush - September 01, 2004




So you’re from Lawrenceville, huh? Well, I’ll talk slowly.

I didn’t say anything bad about Lawrenceville, nutty. I said people find it charming and that it has character.

It’s no Our Fair City, but Lawrenceville is OK.
Webmaster n'at (URL) - September 01, 2004




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